The number of streetlights that can be switched, dimmed and monitored remotely is set to more than double by the end of the decade. Swedish IoT analyst firm Berg Insight now expects the worldwide count of streetlights with their own individual controllers to grow from 38.5 million units at the end of 2025 to 87.6 million units by 2030, which works out to average annual growth of 17.9%.
Two details in the new figures matter as much as the headline number. First, the growth curve is flatter than the one Berg drew a year ago. Second, the radio technology inside the lamppost is changing, with proprietary mesh networks slowly giving up ground to cellular connections and LoRaWAN.
Europe remains the largest market, accounting for 36% of the installed base in 2025. North America follows at 29% and China at 15%. Signify leads the vendor field with about 6.2 million connected lighting controls, followed by Itron and China's Fonda Technology. Between them, those three hold roughly a third of all smart streetlights worldwide, and Berg counts more than 100 companies competing for the rest.
A Strong Market, But A Slower One Than Expected
Smart street lighting added around 5.6 million individually controlled units in 2025, taking the base from 32.9 million to 38.5 million. That is healthy growth of about 17% in a single year for a category that depends on municipal budgets and multi-year public tenders.
It is, however, a little softer than the path Berg projected in August 2025. At that time, the third edition of its report forecast 85 million units by 2029, which implied a CAGR of 20.9%. The new fourth edition pushes the finish line out by a year and lands only slightly higher, at 87.6 million by 2030.
Reading The Revision
If growth were spread evenly along Berg's new curve, the installed base would sit somewhere around 74 million units in 2029. That is Morning Tick's own rough calculation, not a figure Berg has published, and real deployments rarely follow a smooth line. Still, it suggests the market is now expected to reach a given size about a year later than previously thought.
That kind of adjustment is common in public infrastructure. City lighting projects tend to move through budget cycles, procurement rules and council approvals, and a single delayed tender for a large city can shift hundreds of thousands of units from one year to the next. The trend itself is intact. The pace is simply being recalibrated.
Why The Base Is Still Small
Even 87.6 million connected lights would be a modest share of the world's lighting stock. In last year's edition, Berg noted that several hundred million streetlights have been installed globally. Most of them remain either conventional lamps or LED fixtures without individual control.
That gap is the real opportunity for vendors. Many cities have already converted to LED to cut energy bills. Adding a controller to each fixture is often the next step, because it allows operators to dim lights at quiet hours, detect failures without night patrols, and measure actual energy use instead of estimating it.
The Network Under The Lamppost Is Changing
The most interesting shift in Berg's data is technical. Proprietary RF networking, typically a mesh in which each light relays data to its neighbours, still dominates. It accounted for 52% of individually controlled streetlights in 2025, down from 57% a year earlier.
Cellular is the second most common option, and its share is rising as mesh gives ground. LoRa-based technologies, mostly LoRaWAN, came third in 2025. In the previous edition, the third spot belonged to power line communication (PLC), which sends data over the electrical cables that already feed the lights.
Why Cellular Is Gaining
Berg's own explanation is practical. "Cellular is becoming a more established option because of its plug-and-play characteristics, broad network availability and increasingly attractive cost structure," Berg says in its announcement of the report.
In practice, that means a city can fit a cellular controller to a light and have it report straight to a cloud platform, without first building gateways or a mesh. For smaller municipalities, or for lights scattered across wide areas, that removes much of the planning work that mesh networks require. Ubicquia's UbiCell LTE streetlight controller, which fits into the standard photocell socket on top of a luminaire, is one example of that approach in the US market.
The trade-off is recurring cost. A mesh network is largely owned by the city or its contractor, while a cellular controller carries a data subscription for as long as it is in service. The cost of low-power cellular modules has come down sharply, a trend we examined in our piece on why Cat-1 bis won in cellular IoT.
LoRaWAN's Steady Climb
LoRaWAN's move into third place reflects its growing role in city-wide networks that serve more than one application. A municipality that already runs a LoRaWAN network for water meters, waste bins or parking sensors can add streetlight controllers to the same infrastructure. Our coverage of LoRaWAN beyond the smart meter looks at how that multi-purpose model has been spreading, and our explainer on LPWAN networks sets out how these low-power options compare.
Network Lifetimes Matter Here Too
Streetlight controllers are expected to stay in service for many years, often as long as the LED fixture they sit on. That makes network choice a long-term decision. Connected devices built on 2G and 3G have already had to deal with operator switch-offs, a problem we explored in our look at devices going dark in the UK. Anyone buying cellular controllers today has good reason to ask which network generation they use and how long that network is likely to remain available.
Who Is Selling The Lights
Signify's lead is substantial. Its roughly 6.2 million lighting controls in 2025 compare with about 5.8 million a year earlier, according to Berg's two editions. Itron, which is best known for utility metering, holds second place, reflecting how many streetlight networks in North America are run by or alongside utilities. Fonda Technology's third place points to the scale of China's domestic market.
Beyond the top three, Berg's list of notable players includes Ubicquia, Acuity Brands, Dimonoff, LED Roadway Lighting, Schréder, CityLight.net, Revetec, DigitalPlatforms, Flashnet, Rongwen Energy Technology Group and ST Engineering Telematics Wireless. The spread of the field, with more than 100 vendors identified, shows a market that is still fragmented despite the lead of a few large names.
Standards Are Loosening Vendor Lock-in
One factor shaping competition is the move to standard sockets on luminaires. The Zhaga Consortium's Book 18 interface for outdoor luminaires, combined with the DALI Alliance's D4i specification, defines how a controller or sensor physically plugs into a streetlight and how it talks to the driver inside. In North America, ANSI/NEMA sockets play a similar role.
Standard sockets make it easier for a city to buy lights from one supplier and controllers from another, or to swap controllers later without replacing the fixture. That, in turn, helps newer technologies such as cellular controllers compete for business in cities that installed their LED lights years ago.
Beyond Switching Lights On And Off
The original case for smart streetlights was about energy and maintenance. That case still drives most projects. But a connected light pole is also a powered, elevated site with a network connection spread evenly across a city, which makes it an obvious host for other devices.
Cities and vendors have used lighting networks to carry environmental sensors, traffic counters, parking detection and, in some places, small cells for mobile networks. How far that goes depends on budgets, data policies and who owns the pole. Many projects remain focused on lighting alone, and adding other services tends to bring new procurement and privacy questions.
Security Is Part Of The Brief
Every connected controller is also a networked device on public infrastructure. In the EU, rules such as the Cyber Resilience Act for IoT are raising expectations for how connected products are secured and updated over their lifetimes. For city buyers, this means asking vendors how firmware updates are delivered, how long they will be supported, and how access to the lighting management platform is controlled.
What The Numbers Mean For Cities And Vendors
For cities, Berg's figures confirm that smart street lighting has moved well past the pilot stage in Europe and North America, but that most of the world's lights are still unconnected. The questions worth asking before a rollout have shifted from whether the technology works to which network model fits: a city-owned mesh, a shared LoRaWAN network, or cellular controllers with ongoing data costs.
For vendors, the slower-than-forecast curve is a reminder that municipal projects rarely move at the speed of product roadmaps. The shift toward cellular and LoRaWAN also suggests that competition is moving away from proprietary networks toward controllers that work over infrastructure somebody else already runs.
For the connectivity industry, streetlights are becoming a steady source of long-lived IoT connections. Each one is a small data user, but at tens of millions of units, and with lifetimes measured in decades, the category is significant.
The Bottom Line
Smart streetlights are on track to pass 87 million connected units by 2030, according to Berg Insight, more than double today's base. The path is a little slower than expected a year ago, and the technology underneath is shifting from city-built mesh networks toward cellular and LoRaWAN.
The next phase of growth is likely to depend less on proving the benefits of connected lighting and more on making it cheap and simple enough for the thousands of towns that have not yet taken the step.
